


To Only Have You Near

by Schwoozie



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BHF2019, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Fluff, Funeral Home, Huddling For Warmth, Vulnerability, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:46:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21974578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schwoozie/pseuds/Schwoozie
Summary: Beth is skinnier than she should be after all the time they've spent safe in the funeral home, and that isn't helping her keep warm in the depths of winter. Daryl is there—and willing—to give her all he can.
Relationships: Daryl Dixon/Beth Greene
Comments: 12
Kudos: 167
Collections: Bethyl Holidays Fest





	To Only Have You Near

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote something! I hope you enjoy :)
> 
> Written for the Ultimate Bethyl Fic List Christmas prompt, "Gifts".

> _If I could only have you near_   
>  _To breathe a sigh or two_   
>  _I would be happy just to hold the hands I love_   
>  _On this winter's night with you_
> 
> – "Song for a Winter’s Night", Sarah McLachlan

The wind roars outside but it’s warm where they are, in the funeral home sealed up tight. It took months to feel secure enough to light a fire in the building’s ancient grate, but as it got colder and colder Daryl knew they’d have to. He can stand the cold, long as he’s out of the wind, but even a season and a half living off the road hasn’t bulked Beth up as much as he’d like. No matter how much meat he— _they_ , cause it’s rare she’ll let him go without her—bring home, she remains a slip of a thing.

At least her stomach doesn’t cave in beneath her ribs anymore; he caught a glimpse of her when they got a rare chance to wash up just after the flight from the prison, when he was still flinty and withdrawn and bowed beneath Beth’s disappointment. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t say much those days. Still doesn’t, and Beth doesn’t either, but not because they’re both bursting with words they can’t say. There are still things they don’t talk about, in the moments when Beth’s fingers trail from the piano keys and she looks at him. Not with disappointment. With gratitude, maybe. Shit if he knows what for. He’s touched her stomach through her clothes a few times and while she isn’t starving she’s still too skinny for winter, especially the violent ones the end of the world seems to have brought.

She should be warm now—he’s piled her with every blanket they’ve been able to scrounge, sat her at the fire with beans fresh from the pot—but every few minutes he pauses in cleaning his bow to see her body shudder, her shoulders pull in on themselves. After the fourth time he puts down his bow and goes to crouch at her side.

She doesn’t jump when he approaches her. Turns with a sleepy smile, relaxed and rosy-cheeked, and Daryl wants to touch those cheeks to see how soft they are. He’s felt those cheeks, but not the way he wants to; taps to correct her stance with the bow, accidental bumps with his knuckles when he uses his rag to wipe squirrel juice off her chin as she giggles, teases him for mothering her. He doesn’t think he mothers her. A mother—a good one—sure as fuck wouldn’t get as proud as he does seeing her fight off three walkers all on her own, or feel a swooping in the gut when peach juice makes her lips shimmer. He doesn’t mother her but he doesn’t want her to feel sad or get hurt or to look at him ever again the way she did after the prison. Like there was something missing in him, something decent she hoped for but couldn’t find. Because she expects it of everyone. Because she expects it of him.

Shit, before all this went down, no one expected anything from him at all. Rick depended on him since the farm, the whole community depended on him at the prison, but with Beth, it’s different. Sometimes he thinks he could do nothing but sit next to her and she’d be satisfied.

He doesn’t sit yet; balances on the balls of his feet and presses his knuckles to her cheek like he wanted to, but not lingering, not like he really wants. Even that light brush is enough to send light bursting through him.

“How the fuck are you still cold?”

Her smile drops into a frown and even though he doesn’t think he did anything wrong, anxiety roils in his gut at the loss of that smile. “I’m not.”

Daryl raises his eyebrows. “You shake any more, I’d say you were dancing.” He can’t help it; he touches her cheek again. Soft. “You feel like ice,” he murmurs.

Beth shrugs. “I’ve always had trouble getting warm. My circulation or something. It ain’t dangerous.”

“You’re cold,” Daryl says.

Beth tilts her head, shifts beneath the blankets. It’s hard to tell under the glow of the fire, but he thinks she goes a little rosier. She licks her lips with a pink little tongue, glances at her lap and then at him and then her lap again.

She says something so quiet even he can’t hear. He shuffles closer, sees his breath stir the hairs on the nape of her neck.

“What’d you say?”

“Sit with me.” She takes in the look in his eyes and raises her chin, staunch and stubborn. “You’re the one worried about how cold I am. Besides, wouldn’t kill you to get warm yourself.”

“I ain’t cold.”

“You don’t _feel_ cold. There’s a difference.”

Daryl stares at her through several heartbeats: at her soft cheeks, her stubborn chin, her eyes that seem no-nonsense and vulnerable all at once. They’ve never had the need to huddle together for warmth before, not the two of them. She’s always had her family for body heat, and in the winter before the prison Daryl learned not to mind the feeling of someone’s back lined with his as he fell asleep in their grungy, desperate pile. Sometimes Rick would join him on watch and they’d shiver step by step until their shoulders pressed together and they leaned as much on each other as the tree behind them. He liked that. Made him uncomfortable as hell until it didn’t, and it wasn’t so much sharing body heat as making sure the other man didn’t fall. That made some warmth of its own.

But it’s never been this. Two people beneath the same blanket, staring into the same fire; it’s never been _Beth_ , in whose orbit he’s been circling closer and closer. Collision is inevitable but he doesn’t know what it will look like. He doesn’t know what he wants it to look like. He wants her smiling at him, and close enough to touch, but beyond that it’s a swirl of hopes and fears that turns his stomach sideways. Makes him feel clumsy and unprepared and even younger than she is, never mind the grey in his beard and the years he strains against to live with an unbowed back.

Sometimes he thinks he wants permission to feel young, to live the youth he was too angry and embattled to have the first time. To lie in someone else’s arms and let them support his weight and not care if they feel his shivers. To hold him tighter because of them.

Daryl grunts low in his chest and drags his bow within reaching distance, the bundle of bolts beside it. Beth watches him, a smile playing at the corner of her mouth. Once he would’ve thought she was mocking him, or delighting in the power she has to move him—she knows, she must know it, she must know he wouldn’t be this way with anyone else, _for_ anyone else, she knows so much about him without needing to ask, she must know this—but now he knows better. She’s happy to know he’ll be warm. She’s happy to be of use to him for that. Her and only her.

He doesn’t let himself hesitate before shuffling closer, taking the blanket edges she holds out and tugging them around himself. He lets her fuss with making sure they’re both covered and then she’s scooting into him, slotting herself between his arm and his chest and throwing both legs over one of his to curl her knees over his thigh like she’s holding a teddy bear. Contented little noises rise from her chest and he feels her eyelashes flutter against his throat.

He drapes one arm around her shoulders and circles the other to rest a hand on her knee, feels the tights beneath a hole in her jeans with a rough finger. She shivers and nestles closer and she was right, like she always is: He didn’t realize how cold he’d felt until he had her against him.

Daryl closes his eyes, hopes she doesn’t look up to see his flushed cheeks but also hoping she does, hopes she has some idea what she does to him without making him find the words. He’s shit with words—finds they muck things up way more than they put them right—but for her, if she made him, he’d try. She wouldn’t make him, but he’d try anyway. Cause she makes him feel warm.

“You think it’s almost Christmas?” she murmurs, quiet enough that he wouldn’t hear her if they weren’t pressed so close together. “It’s weird not being able to tell. Not seeing lights up, or ornaments come out. Even if we didn’t know the date, we’d know when Christmas was.”

“Days aren’t short enough yet,” Daryl says, speaking just as quietly, barely a rumble in his chest. “Solstice ain’t for another few weeks at least.”

“That’s the same time as Christmas?”

“Mmh. Thereabouts.”

Beth is quiet for a few minutes, head heavy and sweet-smelling against his neck. Like his hand on her knee, she’s touching him; short fingernails scraping patterns in the grain of his jeans. Her breathing is slow and deep and even, and he thinks she might fall asleep soon. He thinks he could too.

He wonders what she would do if he pulled her down, stayed just as wrapped around each other but flat on the floor. Her head pillowed on his chest, rising and falling with his breath; shucking their shoes off so their feet can do a sleepy dance.

Maybe she’d let him rest on her. Lie with his ear to her collarbone and bicep clutching her middle, her strong arms holding him in place, sheltering him from danger as he hopes his arms shelter her. For her to hold him like she did in her cell, like outside the moonshine shack, but not out of grief or rage. To keep him warm. To make him feel warm.

The seduction of that surrender almost makes him ask. He thinks she’d say yes. He knows she would.

“I don’t want to celebrate Christmas,” she says into the silence, the roar of the fire. “Not like I used to, or like we would have at the prison. Just knowing is enough. And… and being here with you.” She huffs out a laugh, a little jump in her shoulders. “I don’t need to ask Santa for anything. I got enough.”

He’s shit with words anyway. But she isn’t. And as he buries his face in her hair and feels the rhythms of her body and the whirl of her sharp mind, he thinks it’s enough for him too.


End file.
